


Kingdom of Iron, Kingdom of Clay

by WhenasInSilks



Series: The Ruins of Babel [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: But still pretty bad, Character Study, Communication Failure, Difficult Decisions, Feelings, I'll add tags when we get there, Ill-Advised Behavior, M/M, POV Tony Stark, Pining, Porn With Plot, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Sokovia Accords, Steve Rogers Feels, Tony Stark Feels, it's hard to hear you around the big fat declaration in your mouth, less shitty communication than last time, or is it rather Plot With Porn, smut incoming anyway, so many feelings, that fucking flip phone, what's that Anthony?, you want Steve out of your life?, your dick is not a declaration Steven
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 19:33:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14503989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/pseuds/WhenasInSilks
Summary: Tony isn't pining. He can’t afford to--doesn't have space for it in his head. It's hard enough just to do his job while wading through the murky waters of post-Accords international politics, and Steve Rogers? He’s a liability, in more ways than one. That's why Tony laid down the law at the end of their last, ill-conceived encounter.“Take care of yourself, Cap. Stay the fuck out of my life.”If only Steve wasn’t so lousy at following orders...(aka the one where Steve and Tony have a conversation, and then another conversation, and then bang things out in a hotel. There's a lot more nuance, world building, character detail, emotional turmoil, etc. but, like. In a nutshell. part of a series)





	Kingdom of Iron, Kingdom of Clay

**Author's Note:**

> I know I promised you Steve and Nat last time, but my brain insisted on skipping ahead to the next bit of conflict and porn so here we are. I might go back and write Steve’s immediate reaction to the end of _Ruins of Babel_ later, we’ll see. 
> 
> I decided to post this as a chaptered fic, because people were asking about it, and I didn’t want to be sitting on completed content, but updates will have to wait at least a month until RBB is done, so, just an FYI... It will be finished though. I mean, the end is where all the porn is, so...
> 
> I encourage y’all to read the earlier installments for context (and porn!) but it’s not strictly necessary. 
> 
> Thanks so much to fox, miles, superhusbands4ever, and enki for cheer-reading this for me, to Janonny for all the wonderful character discussions, and to S for listening.

Tony’s hands aren’t shaking.

He knows this for a fact. Ever since his post-Manhattan panic attacks opened up a thrilling new world of ways for his body to betray him, he’s made sure that each of the suits contain an override protocol to stabilize against involuntary muscle movement. He could be in the middle of an epileptic fit, and the armor would hold him as still and steady as one of the guards at Buckingham Palace, albeit infinitely better dressed.

Thousands of feet below him, the countryside blurs into an indistinct patchwork of yellow and brown, shading to grey in the shadow of the waning afternoon.

Carnelia. This time last year, who had even heard of it? Apart from trivia buffs, international relations majors, and—just maybe—its own ministers. And today it was the battlefield for two wars: the one lying in wait for Tony’s arrival, and the one that followed him here.

God damn it.

God _damn_ it.

Tony throws his hands—the ones which aren’t shaking—down by his sides and rockets upwards until he’s all but skimming the clouds. A little higher and the world would vanish entirely, smothered in white.

This is where storms are born.

SI’s environmental engineering division has been looking into cloud-seeding technology, developing cheaper, more environmentally friendly solutions. People used to pray for rain. Cultures all over the world developed elaborate rituals to ensure a wet season and a good harvest, but a miracle is just something Tony Stark hasn’t gotten his hands on yet. Give them eighteen months—two years, at the outside—and they’ll bring water to the desert. Drought will be a thing of the past, and all these clouds will become so much raw material. The climate cycle is flawed anyway. Tony can make a better one. Honestly, if there is some kind of creator-God—and Tony’s not ruling it out entirely, because, with the shit he's seen?—but if Intelligent Design is a thing, then Tony’s got a few choice words for the Designer. He’s got the wind at his back and the future is bright and—

He shouldn’t be flying this high, not really. It’s not that it’s dangerous; FRIDAY would warn him well before he got in the way of any air traffic, but he is technically operating an unregistered craft in Carnelian airspace, and it’ll probably make things a little smoother, diplomatically speaking, if he keeps his movements easily visible.

He certainly didn’t make himself any friends by refusing the military escort back to his hotel suite, but he _did_ singlehandedly take down a gaggle of homegrown terrorists this morning, so allowances have been made. Tony graciously refrained from pointing out exactly how useless his military escort had proved when said terrorists decided to turn SI’s shiny new Eastern European headquarters into a statement on foreign investment (spoiler alert: they were against it).

Well. He didn’t point it out in so many words, anyway.

Still. Diplomacy.

Pepper ought to be proud.

The worst thing about diplomacy, he’s found, is that it never stops. You can’t just hit a quota and move on to the next thing. You have to _keep on doing it_.

Still, it’s nice, if only for a moment, to get away—to touch the clouds. Nice to pretend that this kind of distance is something he gets to keep.

He huffs out a laugh. Christ. What a concept. _Something to keep_.

He takes a deep breath, in and out, ignoring the way his stomach keeps clenching, and drops to a more respectable 12,000 feet.

“How’s the coverage?” he asks.

“Largely positive so far,” FRIDAY informs him. “Seventy percent approval within Carnelia, eighty-five in Symkaria and other border states, sixty-five worldwide.”

“Any official response from the UNSC?”

“They’re emphasizing the self-defense aspect.”

Tony nods. ‘Captain of industry fights to preserve life and livelihood.’ It’s a good angle, not least because it’s the only light in which his actions are remotely legal—operations in non-signatory countries like Carnelia tend to be pretty heavily frowned upon by the UN, to put things mildly. Still, taking down terrorists usually plays well, and his approval ratings are likely to climb even higher when he announces his plan to personally fund all necessary reconstruction in the wake of the attack.

He remembers, quite distinctly, a time when he didn’t have to worry about things like _coverage_ and _spin_ , when his primary interest in public opinion lay in educating the public about the many and varied places they should feel free to shove it.

Good thing he’s a futurist, or he’d drive himself crazy with all this looking back.

He flexes his fingers, breathes in, and then out.

“Any mention of our unexpected guests?”

_A flash of bright hair, and the thud of a body hitting the ground, just a fraction of a second before his repulsor fired—_

He’s almost certain he was the only one to see, but— Jesus, if he’s _wrong_ —

“No reports of additional super activity at or around the scene, boss.”

Tony breathes out. It feels nothing at all like relief. It feels like a delay, like the procrastination of disaster.

“See what you can get from the more secure channels. Carnelian intelligence, CIA, UNSC—that should be enough to start.”

“Estimated decryption time minimum 3.7 hours,” FRIDAY says warningly.

“Guess you better hop to it then. You find anything, let me know straightaway. Same deal if the coverage starts to swing.”

“Got it.”

“And FRIDAY?”

“Boss?”

Tony can feel a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He doesn’t know why. He doubts there’s a drop of humor left in him. “Don’t get caught.”

And now there’s only one thing left to do before he touches ground.

There’s a storm howling around the outer reaches of his mind, battering his well-shored defenses. He’s decided to call it anger, that storm. The other options simply don’t bear thinking of.

He swallows. “Initiate Protocol 407K918.’

“Protocol 407K918 ‘Paging Captain Asshole’ initiated.”

Nothing happens. It occurs to Tony that maybe he made a mistake in routing the flip phone through the armor. Genius he may be, but the thing is a relic. Not that that’s a surprise, given the source.

For an instant, there’s nothing in Tony’s ears but the roar of the wind and the thump of his own heartbeat, and he knows, he _knows_ with a certainty that cuts to the bone that the hardware has failed and the call isn’t going through and he isn’t going to have to do this. Not now. Not today.

Distantly, a phone begins to ring.

The winds in his mind pick up force and speed. Wood creaks and threatens to buckle as the tempest wails and wails…

Tony reminds himself that this is what anger feels like.

There’s the click of the line picking up.

Tony comes in fast and hard, riding the edge of the storm.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“Hello, Tony,” and as it turns out, he doesn’t have to pretend to be angry, he doesn’t have to pretend at all because fucked if his name spoken so calmly in that rolling baritone doesn’t make him want to _tear something apart_.

“Do you have any idea,” he asks, and his hands may not be shaking, but the same can’t be said for his voice, “what your little stunt today put in jeopardy? Bad enough that I’m now expected to fulfill the global superhero quota with only myself, a lovesick android, and—” _a paraplegic pilot_ is what he’s going to say, but then he thinks of Rhodey, face set with grim good humor even as his legs give way beneath him, and the words die on his lips. Luckily, he’s Tony Stark, and there’s not a power on Earth that can stop him once he’s got a good wind going. “Oh no, you had to go and risk every scrap of legitimacy I’ve managed to scrape together—”

“You weren’t answering my calls. I was concerned.”

“I realize this might be a little new to you, seeing as how you come from the Dark Ages, but there’s this wonderful invention called a text message—”

“You told me if I didn’t stop trying to contact you you’d drop the phone into the Atlantic.”

“ _Learn to take a hint!_ ”

Tony snaps his jaw shut, hard enough to hurt. That’s not— That’s not him, he doesn’t shout. He never shouts. It’s just too much, it’s too damn much. How is it Rogers always makes him feel so damn much _?_

Rogers continues, with dogged, tooth-grinding calm. “I had intelligence that—”

“Oh, you had intelligence? I mean, here I am with the might of the UN Security Council behind me and the world’s only genuine AI managing my appointment book, but who needs all of that when I’ve got an international fugitive with a badly dyed uniform and a severe overestimation of his own relevance calling in tips to my hotline!”

“I was concerned,” Rogers says again.

Tony feels something bubbling up in his throat. He isn’t sure whether it’s a laugh or a sob, and he can’t pretend this is about anger anymore. At least, not just anger.

“You shouldn’t have known enough to _be_ concerned. You’re supposed to be… I don’t know, lying on a beach in Tahiti drinking extra-virgin piña coladas and basking in your own self-righteousness. But you just couldn’t leave well enough alone, no. You had to sic Spy vs Spy on my ass, and now—”

His throat closes before he can finish the thought, and _god damn you,_ he thinks, _god damn you for making me do this_. He reaches for the resurgent heat of his anger but it starts and smokes and gutters, too tainted by regret and other irrelevancies.

“Clint and Natasha are two of the best undercover operatives in the world,” Rogers says, like this is somehow supposed to be news to Tony. Or maybe that’s the point. Maybe what Rogers is really saying ‘I trust my team and I don’t give two flying fucks what you think.’ Tony could respect that. Might even make things easier. (Please, god, let this be easier.) “No one saw them—”

“ _I_ saw them.”

“—who wasn’t intended to see.”

As traps go, it’s not particularly sophisticated. Dangle an intriguing piece of information—‘Oooh, Captain America _wanted_ me to see; I wonder why!’—leave him to jump and snatch after the rest of it like a kitten after a length of string, and suddenly the conversation’s not on his terms anymore.

Such a shame ‘simplistic’ isn’t the same as ‘ineffective.’

Here’s the thing about Tony. People will claim he’s incapable of self-denial; Tony thinks they just don’t understand what it is to want the way he does.

Tony wants so much in that the moment he thinks he could split the sky in two with it.

Check him now.

Self-denying.

“It was good to see Romanoff again.” Keep it light, that’s the way. Lighter than air. It’s almost the same thing as ‘untouchable.’ “Well, I say good. Actually it was a fucking disaster, but still, nice to know Mata Hari managed to join your band of merry men after all. I’m sure you’ll all be very happy together.”

“ _Tony_.”

The sound of his name in that particular tone makes Tony’s stomach go tight and unpleasantly squirmy, an almost Pavlovian reaction—‘ _you’ve disappointed Captain America_.’ Which is bullshit, of course, because there is no Captain America anymore, and anyway, what about all the times Captain America disappointed him?

That, more than anything—the recognition of that lie—is what allows Tony to continue.

“Now, if you could do me a favor and never contact me again, I might just be able to salvage this situation. Don’t call, don’t write, don’t send me a goddamn card at Christmas, got it?”

There’s a certain savage pleasure to breaking things. Tony knows that better than most. It’s like the call of the void, except for assholes instead of depressives, and Tony is nothing if not an asshole. An asshole and an engineer, and so he knows quite well that nothing burns so brightly as the bridge you built yourself.

So he’d expected to feel… _something_ at this final, most permanent rupture. Some small measure of satisfaction, or relief.

He doesn’t.

He just hurts, a deep, dull, full-body ache, a pain with no pleasure to it.

Rogers hasn’t said anything yet. Tony expected arguments—has, in fact, been rehearsing counterpoints and vicious rebuttals in one corner of his mind. But as the seconds tick by, it occurs to him that maybe Rogers isn’t going to argue. And that’s—

He can live with that. It’s fine. Saves him time.

He wishes the man would say something, though. Whatever he says next will in all likelihood be the last words Tony hears from him in a very long time.

He wishes it didn’t matter so much what they are.

He isn’t sure who he despises more, himself for caring, or Rogers for making him.

And still the man is silent.

It occurs to Tony that the lines might have dropped—he is, after all, pushing 500 mph several thousand meters above ground level and interfacing with a piece of Neolithic technology to boot. It’s not impossible that he’s lost the signal. He slows down to a more sedate 200 knots, and is rewarded with the faint but perfectly audible sound of Rogers’ breathing.

He catches a hot updraft of rage and rides it skyward. No, scratch that. He fucking _soars_.

“Am I getting through to you? Are these words actually penetrating that artificially thickened skull? This is us over. Through. Kaput. I don’t want to see you, or hear from you. In fact, why don’t you go ahead and keep at least half a mile away from me at all times? An unofficial restraining order, if you will, and you will. I think we can both agree I’ve earned that much.”

“Approaching destination,” FRIDAY informs him. “Estimated arrival time: five minutes.”

Tony shoves at the words threatening to spill from his throat. Best to end this now. On his terms, whether or not Rogers will acknowledge them.

“I told you to stay out of my life,” he says, and stops.

That was… not what he’d intended to say.

That was not what he’d intended to say at all, and he hates it, he really fucking hates it, hates the hint of accusation, the intimation of betrayal. The last thing he wanted to do was to make this personal.

Still, if anything would be enough to get Rogers to speak, surely referencing that night would—

Rogers says nothing.

Good thing Tony’s had a lifetime to learn how to deal with disappointment.

“Well,” he says into the silence. “Great talking to you. Let’s do this again never. FRIDAY?”

FRIDAY terminates the call.

And there it is.

The end.

Tony breathes out, starting his deceleration in preparation for landing. He feels… hollow. Painfully so, like someone’s reached inside him and scraped out his insides with a melon-baller.

He inhales, exhales again.

“Seriously,” he says, and if his voice is a little rougher than usual, there’s no one but his AI to hear. “Fuck that guy.”

“Would you like me to add that to your to-do list?” FRIDAY asks brightly.

Tony opens his mouth to snarl out a negative, then stops. “You know what?” he says. “That was actually pretty funny. Wildly inappropriate, but funny. Try anything like it again and I’ll transfer your coding into a Tickle-Me Elmo.”

“Noted,” FRIDAY says, sounding smug.

A smile slides across his face but finds no traction. Tony feels exhausted. Stripped to the bone. He wants a drink so badly he’s practically salivating. There’s a bottle of twenty-five year old Johnnie Walker waiting for him in the hotel suite. That, and probably a few dozen angry voicemails from the Secretary of State, but those, he decides, can wait.

Three fingers of the good stuff, taken neat. That’s what he needs. And tomorrow he’ll have his press conference, announce his intentions to rebuild, to personally see to the reconstruction of everything those fuckers had damaged. Full scale urban renewal, wrapped up in enough posturing defiance to make it go down easy. He’s going to put Carnelia on the _map,_ and he’ll start with the city a bunch of reactionaries brutalized to get to him. Buy up land where houses were destroyed and build new homes, cheaper, with more amenities and longterm tenancy agreements. Use local labor and partner with small businesses. Subsidize STEM education in the local schools; invest in the future. He will turn this into a good.

He _will_.

The hotel is a blinking green dot on the HUD. Tony dims his repulsors for the descent.

“Boss,” FRIDAY says, an unexpected tension in her voice, “preliminary heat scans indicate there’s someone in the suite.”

Tony stops in midair. He’s still a good hundred feet above the penthouse. “Housekeeper?” he asks, unoptimistically. More likely his fan club from this morning—what was it they called themselves? the sons of someone or other?—were a little better organized than he’d expected. An Iron Man’s work is never done.

“Difficult to tell from this altitude,” FRIDAY hedges.

Tony obliging drops a few dozen feet.

“Unknown is approximately six feet in height with highly developed muscle mass and an unusually high body temperature. Suspected enhanced or extra-terrestrial physiology. So,” FRIDAY adds, because for some unaccountable reason Tony programmed her to think she has a sense of humor, “probably not the housekeeper, Boss.”

None of the fighters Tony had encountered today had been enhanced. Unless…

Son of a bitch.

“FRIDAY,” he says aloud, “there’s going to be a murder.”

“How exciting,” FRIDAY observes comfortably. “Will you be needing an accomplice? Shall I notify Colonel—”

“Voice protocol deactivated,” Tony snaps, and is rewarded with instant silence. He allows himself half a second of guilt before redirecting his attention to the problem at hand.

He lands on the balcony, hard enough to send cracks radiating out from the point of impact, and flips up his visor.

“Identification Tony Stark, guest access code six eight nine delta four nine six. Open the door.”

The door opens. Tony steps inside.

The penthouse suite is clean and brightly lit, with the kind of sparkling, soulless elegance that high end hotels identify with luxury. It is also, as FRIDAY informed him, already occupied.

Just seconds ago, there had been so many words massing on Tony’s tongue that he’d scarcely known where he would begin. Now, staring at the intruder currently sitting, stiff and out of place on the flute-backed sofa, Tony reaches for something to say, and finds nothing at all.

“Well.” The corner of Steve Rogers’ mouth quirks in an almost-smile. “This is awkward.”

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly more obscure title this time, so if you were wondering, it’s a reference to the Book of Daniel and the prophesied coming of a kingdom of iron, symbolized by a statue with feet of mingled iron and clay. “And as you saw the feet and toes, part of potter's clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it the strength of the iron… And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken” (Daniel 2:41-42), and like, if that ain’t Tony… 
> 
> Honestly, it’s not even cute how many title changes this went through—I’m starting to suspect I might be overthinking things. Like, this is just for porn, right? Right???
> 
> Come find me on tumblr [here](http://whenas-in-silks.tumblr.com/) or at my designated Marvel blog [here](http://sister-stark.tumblr.com/). Comments are love <3


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